Frankly, if there ever was a time when I was really happy, it wasn't during those first intoxicating moments of my success, but long before that, when I hadn't yet read or shown my manuscript to anyone -- during those long nights of ecstatic hopes and dreams and passionate love of my work, when I had grown attached to my vision, to the characters I had created myself, as though they were my own offspring, as though they really existed -- and I loved, rejoiced and grieved over them, at times even shedding quite genuine tears over my guileless hero.
...with a click, my novel would be born; it would come out into the light suddenly transformed from the hypothetical text composed in my imagination into finished, tangible thing with a real and independent existence. The moment of clicking on the print button always gave rise to strange and powerful ambivalence--a combination of self-satisfaction, gloom and anxiety. Self-satisfaction for having finished writing the book. Gloom because taking my leave of the characters has the same effect on me as when a group of friends have to depart. And anxiety, perhaps because I am on the verge of delivering up into other people's hands something that I treasure.
It’s hard to describe the feeling that comes with starting your own business. It really is so much work in the beginning that you lose yourself in it. You lose your sense of time, and you can’t believe how quickly the days go by because there’s no time to focus on much of anything else. But then you open the doors, and it’s like you’ve given birth to this new thing that didn’t exist before. Then when it starts to flourish, well, that’s just icing on the cake. To get to see it live and breathe and to know that this thing you created out of thin air can put a smile on other people’s faces is such a blessing.
The story of John Ritter illustrates what it means to be a hero and how we treat our heroes. When we idealize real people they lose their humanity. They are turned into idols that we worship and may later want to destroy. Heroes are transformed from conscious-feeling fellow homo sapiens into characters in our stories. The greatest hero-characters will become legends or even mythic characters. We might think we know them, but when they are idolized they become more like treasured memories, existing in our minds as archetypal characters, rather than living-breathing human beings with thoughts and feelings of their own.
What do you see when you see me?' She asked him, burying her own face in his bosom. 'Do you want the truth?'She nodded.'The firing squad.''That's not the whole truth. Try again.''Insatiability,' he said with some bitterness.'That's oblique but altogether too simple. Once more,' she insisted. 'One more time.'He was silent for several minutes.'The map of a country in which I only exist by virtue of the extravagance of my metaphors.''Now you're being too sophisticated. And, besides, what metaphors do we have in common?
Be so busy loving your life and your loved ones so that you have no time for the naysayers, doubters, haters, or regrets. You will be joined on this mission by other AAOC's some known to you and some yet to reveal themselves to you as you progress on this journey known as life. The reward will be a legacy of meaningful lessons learned and experiences shared with family and friends which will make it clear that you have truly lived not simply existed. Like most challenges that seem incredibly hard, this is no different. However, what awaits you at the finish line is what you have made of it. Agent 025 The Oracle
What’s it gonna be like, dying? To go to sleep and never, never, never wake up.Well, a lot of things it’s not gonna be like. It’s not going to be like being buried alive. It’s not going to be like being in the darkness forever.I tell you what — it’s going to be as if you never had existed at all. Not only you, but everything else as well. That just there was never anything, there’s no one to regret it — and there’s no problem. Well, think about that for a while — it’s kind of a weird feeling when you really think about it, when you really imagine.[The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are ]
You live," I said, "Knowing you will die. Everyone lives every day knowing they could die at any moment. And yet they carry on. They lift their heads high and carry on and build a beautiful, amazing world. What for, if there is no point? Bravery. Courage. To live knowing death hangs over you. Sweet misery, fragile threads of life and existence, and you still fight for every moment, to be alive and to be as alive as possible.""And the point?""The point, Jane, is for beauty. Simplistic, joyous beauty; complicated, twisted beauty-- the beauty of courage, the beauty of loss. For if there is a Something Else out there, it is surely hidden among the beauty of this world.
... since I was still, and must for long remain, in that period of life when one has not yet separated the fact of this sensual pleasure from the various women in whose company one has tasted it, when one has not reduced it to a general idea which makes one regard them thenceforward as the variable instruments of a pleasure that is always the same. Indeed, that pleasure does not exist, isolated and formulated in the consciousness, as the ultimate object with which one seeks a woman's company, or as the cause of the uneasiness which, in anticipation, one then feels. Hardly even does one think of oneself, but only how to escape from oneself.
One particular aspect of Siddhartha’s revelation of the outside world has always struck me. Quite possibly he lived his first thirty years without any knowledge of number. How must he have felt, then, to see crowds of people mingling in the streets? Before that day he would not have believed that so many people existed in all the world. And what wonder it must have been to discover flocks of birds, and piles of stones, leaves on trees and blades of grass! To suddenly realise that, his whole life long, he had been kept at arm’s length from multiplicity.